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gazzhowie · 2 years ago

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My Top 25 Movies of 2022.

It has continued to be a weird time in cinema, post-pandemic, as we've started to get used to the glaring evidence that studios will sabotage their own content line to honour some new 45 day streaming deal... and the films that brace against said deal offer tsunamis cash in return but seemingly no means to change the studios' course.

We're now two or three back-to-back $250 million comic book disasters from the total destabilisation of cinema as we know it now! Anyway, rant over... it is time… or at least tradition… for me to dust off the cobwebs from my Tumblr account and post my Top 25 movies of the year. This time for 2022.

[Years 2008 through to present are available in the archive.]

Frequent visitors know that I’ll throw out a few special mentions to all the films that I wish I could’ve included but couldn’t make fit yet believe they deserve a shout-out regardless and then I get stuck into what I think are the 25 best films of the year.

As always, films listed are based on their UK release date whether that’s in the cinema or on DVD, VOD etc. Anyway, without further ado, here are the ‘also-rans’ and ‘near-misses’ separated per genre that very nearly made the final list:

Of the animated movies released this year - and in a year when I was drowning in this genre through content-overload due to having two young boys - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, Wendell & Wild, Mad God, Fireheart, The Bad Guys and The Sea Beast were all stand-outs.

Comedy-wise I liked both Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and The Lost City way, way, way more than I thought I was going to in the case of both. And when it comes to dramas I was impressed by The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Survivor, Thirteen Lives, Amsterdam (somewhat controversially, apparently), The Outfit and A Hero.

In the world of b-movies, exploitation flicks and straight to dvd/blu-ray/streamer I very much enjoyed Fall, Hell Hath No Fury, Violent Night, Smile, The Northman and Fresh. And blockbuster-wise, I really enjoyed Avatar: The Way of Water in all its heavily flawed / long-awaited glory, The Gray Man, RRR, Beast, Ambulance, Bullet Train, Raging Fire and Dune.

But really 2022 was where documentaries got to shine and I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend the varied selection of subjects offered up in Is That Black Enough For You, The Super Bob Movie, The Alpinist, Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis, The Tindler Swindler, Sidney and Into The Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.

Now...

... without further ado, my TOP 25 MOVIES OF 2022!

25. Beavis & Butthead Do The Universe

I've spoken before of my accepted hypocrisy surrounding these characters / their show and how my apathy towards them turned to affection when their 1997 film was released.

I'm hereby cementing that hypocrisy by acknowledging that whilst I STILL don't get the appeal of those original shows, this sits solidly alongside the first film... and currently stands as one of the best comedies of 2022.

Nope, I can't explain it either.

But funny is funny and there's some terrifically funny stuff here.

24. Ted K

I can't believe there's apparently zero 'chatter' around this. It sneaks up on you as one of the best films of the year - a small-scale character study of the infamous Ted 'Unabomber' Kaczynski, measured in its approach but fiery in its central (and mostly solo) performance from Sharlto Copley.

I have a friend who's worked with Copley on both HARDCORE HENRY and FREE FIRE and described him as one of the most unnecessarily cruel people they've worked with - an egotist quick to flash between machismo-drenched "mate-iness" and irrational fury at the smallest of things.

A performance like this from Copley indicates there's truth to the old industry saying that all the best are bastards.

Written and directed (as well as produced and edited) by Tony Stone, the film is quietly methodical and completely involving. It has an unmatched authenticity to it by utilising only the content of Kaczynski's manifestos for dialogue and matters of court record for the plot.

It's so committed to staying within Kaczynski's "voice" that it is scary how you catch yourself occasionally agreeing with his perspective on certain matters now the things he 'warned' against have come to pass... then have to remember he was a fuckin lunatic first, a psychopath second and a 'prophet' much, MUCH further down the line!

23. X

I'm a big fan of Ti West. He's not prolific - though this already seems like an ‘out of date’ statement seeing as he used the pandemic lockdown(s) to turn this into an entire trilogy! - and he doesn't claim to be anything that he absolutely isn't (hello Eli Roth!) but he quietly delivers the goods.

His debut THE ROOST isn't a great film but there are flashes within it that show a filmmaker of real potential. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL is one of the best slow burns and has one of the best third acts in modern horror. THE INNKEEPERS is an absolutely underrated gem and his play on Jonestown with THE SACRAMENT slowly flips into a nasty and absorbing effort. I'm also a massive fan of his legit Western, IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE, which is fuckin mint and you should definitely seek that out.

It's very easy to dismiss what West is doing here as just an exacting homage to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE but it's more than that. Obviously, there are overt nods to it but you could also suggest West is doffing his cap affectionately to Paul Thomas Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS, Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO and, yes, both Lewis Teague's ALLIGATOR and Tobe Hooper's EATEN ALIVE as well.

As both writer and director, he knows you've read the log-line - a group of 70s young filmmakers set out to make porn on a Texas farm but have to fight for their lives when their elderly hosts take against them - and he knows you're here for the sex and the gore. And he delivers solidly in both regards... but only as camouflage to play around thematically with cinema's complicated relationship with sex and violence, whilst commenting of sorts on religious/political conservativism and the well-known adage that nothing makes an old person feel old quite like the young.

The cast - Mia Goth (in dual roles, wink wink), Jenna Ortega, Martin 'Remember Him?' Henderson, a surprisingly great Brittany Snow and Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi - do grand work with what West gives them.

No one should try and suggest this is anything unique or any sort of game-changer in the world of horror. It isn't. It's a standard stalk-and-slash in most regards - that's a cut above the norm due to what West is bringing to the table.

22. Benedetta

I had an absolute blast with this - constantly enthralled as to whether it was ever going to lose balance of the precarious pile of tones it had amassed for itself, and plummet from one to the other beyond repair; high campery, religious/historical document or erotic psychological thriller.

Paul Verhoeven - long since done with Hollywood excess - masterfully curates and cultivates each so they somehow feel a complete companion to the other in ways that just simply shouldn't work.

After all, how many borderline camp historical erotic psychological nun dramas do you know of that are drowning in plaudits?

Verhoeven's handling is relaxed because he knows that he's hit a lottery win in casting Virginie Efira as Benedetta and Daphne Patakia as Bartolomea. With them nailing the material and the tone he is shooting for he can afford himself confidence that the end result will be as excellent as it is.

21. Christmas Bloody Christmas

I'm a Joe Begos fan and was very much looking forward to this, though I'll absolutely understand why it ain't going to be for everyone. Begos - who's ALMOST HUMAN and VFW I like a great deal (BLISS and THE MIND'S EYE somewhat less so) - makes movies for fans of 1980s exploitation and gutter cinema. He's the bastard step-child of Frank Henenlotter and James Glickenhaus and he writes and directs like he doesn't have a single fuck to give.

Nowhere is that screamingly more apparent than in the set-up for this, his latest movie where his attitude seems to be "Yeah, there's a department store robotic Santa Claus that has old military hardware in it, so fuckin what? Deal with it!"

Begos makes threadbare Carpenter / Romero homages; bargain basement gratuitous genre movies full of inventive gusto and practical effects - his movies don't 'mean' anything, he just wants to ink his influences onto a filmic bat and then bludgeon you with it.

A delightfully game and fully committed Riley Dandy really sells the schlock here. And there's a great time to be had here. It's a 'five beer masterpiece' of sandpaper raw creativity, with Begos rolling out a green and red neon-drenched BEFORE SUNRISE for piss-heads that evolves into a gory festive hack-and-slash horror flick before, with a quick salute to ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, kicking the gear up to the highest notch as a punk rock TERMINATOR.

20. Kimi

I was obviously going to be predisposed to liking this on the grounds that it is the master Steven Soderbergh working from a script by the repeatedly excellent David Koepp to do a modernised REAR WINDOW but with a 21st-century spin involving virtual assistant technology, starring "soooo hot right now" Zoë Kravitz.

But I wasn't prepared for just how thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyable it was.

It's a master craftsman making unashamedly pulpy, tight-as-hell, mainstream genre fare.

Kravitz is magnificent. Soderbergh barrels the whole thing along at a rate of knots...

... It was the first goddamn great ride of 2022 for me.

19. Elvis

I was pretty damn sure I was going to haaaate this because the marketing of it had me royally turned off and Baz Luhrmann tends to leave an inconsistent 'taste' in my mouth with his films.

Shockingly though from the get-go, this thing knocked me back and put a huge grin on my face - the Elvis "legend" done as a massively overblown live-action 'cartoon' with all the visual gaudiness that the man himself would be proud of.

It's so dazzlingly kinetic straight-out-the-gate that you wonder how they're going to maintain this - and the answer is they don't. Around the 40-odd minute mark, the giddy overblown live-action 'cartoon' gives way to a conventional biopic and you think to yourself "No. Wait. Where is the ~other~ film?"

It intermittently returns in fits and starts to that level of energy and when it does the film is all the better... the overblown live-action 'cartoon' area is where Tom Hanks' sort of iffy, insanely broad 'almost Batman villain esque' performance sits best for obvious reasons. In ELVIS' grand dramatic "straight" moments it's the super rare thing; a Hanks performance that could be considered bad.

The marketing and the trailers would have you believe Baz Luhrmann's choice of Elvis is stupefyingly basic and prettified. The reality is that Austin Butler does something here of real depth and texture that will surprise you. Especially seeing as he achieves this amidst Luhrmann's most gaudy excess.

John Carpenter's miniseries may well remain the granddaddy of the Elvis Presley mythos. But inconsistencies bedamned, there's still a grand time to be had here.

18. Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers

I was as shocked as you probably will be yourselves that one of the funniest comedies of the year is this:

... a fucking CHIP N' DALE: RESCUE RANGERS movie - recalibrated by The Lonely Island trio as a, get this, redress of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT with a loving ode to the work of Shane Black's action buddy movies and PI capers.

It's astonishingly good and, thanks to the insane amount of background gags and ridiculous in-jokes, its rewatch factor will prove to be insane.

Frankly, any movie that takes the best breakout comedian of the last few years and builds a role for him around the best Internet joke / biteback of 2019 deserves to be regarded as a masterpiece!

17. Lou

I saw the 'Bad Robot' production card come up instantly at the start of this and I immediately bristled because I can't remember a time when that wasn't a bastion for "fucking up a good thing". But I have to admit this thing bloody rocked - hard!

Like with NOBODY, the snarky expectation that this was going to be a smirk-inducing irreverent take on those 'elder-action' movies - with the casting of someone thoroughly unexpected (in this case character acting legend Allison Janney!) then building a crazy action b-movie around them - gives way to something surprisingly... legitimate!

Director Anna Foerster (a longstanding colleague and collaborator of Roland Emmerich) works closely with cinematographer Michael McDonough to make a great-looking, lean as fuck, propulsive film full of washed-out greys and vibrant greens as characters barrel through a drenched wilderness in an extremely solid play on TAKEN and DEADLY PURSUIT.

And Foerster's best asset is in the casting of folk like Allison Janney, Jurnee Smollett, Logan Marshall-Green and Matt Craven - none of whom are phoning this in, at all. Janney, in particular, is fully committed to this and its that commitment that accentuates the shit out of this.

You can go into this with your nose turned up and your standards dialled down, but that'll only serve to have the surprise hit you harder at what an excellent character study and impressively ace action movie this reveals itself to be.

16. Speak No Evil

"Why... are... you doing this?" "Because you let me!"

I'm very conflicted here on what I can or should say about this film by way of any sort of recommendation.

There's elements to it that easily secure it a place in my end-of-year Top 25... yet by granting it a place it works against my desperate need to do everything I can to forget I ever saw this.

It's the sort of film that in my twenties I'd be calling a "masterpiece" but now, as a parent (with its dialogue so on the nose that at its most harrowing it has characters saying reassuring things I say to my eldest all the time - only for them to be devastatingly proven a lie here!) I was left broken by it.

So much so that, no word of a lie, when it was finished I sat up into the early hours watching 'comfort movies' whilst muttering to myself "Why did they not run?" "Why did they accept their fate so willingly?" "What the... FUCK?"

Christian Tafdrup should absolutely be commended for making a film so expertly calibrated as he moves the narrative through observations on masculinity and assertiveness then onto a dark satire of social graces and expected norms... before throwing his hands up in a 'Yeah, you got me. I was just fucking with you - This IS a horror movie!' sort of manner.

His film wouldn't work without that quartet of performances either. And Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch are exceptional as the Danish couple taken out of their depth by their own politeness, whilst Fedja van Huêt and Karina Smulders are outstandingly vile as the Dutch couple who... invite them over.

It all leads to a place that has to be left undescribed and unspoiled. Its potency will be at its highest if you go in knowing nothing. But it will and should destroy you. You can grimace and grumble at the lack of proactive protectiveness displayed by its leads (and no parent worth their salt is going to watch this without pulling a 'Mark Wahlberg after 9/11' by going "That ain't how it would've gone down on MY watch, motherfucker!!") but it won't dilute the truly upsetting and disturbing power of it anyway.

15. Nope

I went back for a second go-around and really liked it even more. I definitely appreciated it a lot more for what Jordan Peele was trying to pull off and genuinely admired it for pushing to be different.

Once it gets its 'ducks in a row' it goes off and goes off hard and fast. It delivers what you're wanting it to - effectively and efficiently, but not necessarily by way of "the little green men" route many will be expecting.

It's a terrific though wobbly horror thriller. Another sign that Jordan Peele is •developing• into a great director (not necessarily a great writer). He's just not your "new John Carpenter" right now so let's calm down, huh?

I just still don't 'get' the manner in which we have elevated Peele to "master craftsman" status as a filmmaker after just 3 movies when his efforts are in no way flawless or particularly 'masterful' as such.

I'm even saying this as someone who has really enjoyed the guy's work thus far too. Including this film. But each one shows a filmmaker who's really good... but just not quite there yet. Certainly, as a writer/director, whereby he displays a skill as the latter that's nowhere near matched with the former.

GET OUT is great but absolutely overcooks its own second act, allowing you the viewer to 'get out' ahead of the film and wait for it to catch up. There are elements of US that indicate Peele is even better there, only up until the end of the second act when it becomes obvious the man is all 'concept' and no 'clue'.

Here, the film feels positively laborious straight-out-the-gate as pieces are moved into place - it's another film that seems unwilling to acknowledge we've seen the trailer, we know what we're fuckin here for so there's no fun for us in watching Peele find his way on screen in the film itself to get us to the destination we're come to it for.

As I said though, once it gets its foundations laid it's a great ride with some very intense, effective and evocative set-pieces. This could actually be my favourite of Peele's movies so far.

14. The Batman

Did you watch SE7EN and ZODIAC and think to yourself "Man, this thing would kick so much more arse if BATMAN was the lead investigator?" Then boy oh boy do I have the film FOR YOU!

Revisiting it at home on a smaller screen, this 'breathes' differently. The reality is that it is an overindulgent 2-hour action thriller in the body of a 3-hour blockbuster. It's surprisingly less stacked in the grandiose action set-pieces than you'd expect for a comic book movie of this ilk (it's 70-odd minutes before it puts anything remotely blockbustery on show in terms of bombastic action) so watching it in your living room means you can off-set its length by pretending it's actually a miniseries type of deal.

There were things that aggravated me about this (it's far too long - unnecessarily long) and the cinematography by Greig Fraser is just TOO damn dark; there are moments here where the lack of visual clarity in simple dialogue scenes makes it impossible to see who the hell is talking to who.

And the film's excessive length is padded out with investigations into riddles that are rudimentary at best and kind of lack sophistication considering the speed it is taking "the world's greatest detective" to solve them.

But overall I had an absolute blast with it.

It took me a ~little~ bit to bed in with Robert Pattinson, an actor I've never really rated outside of the phenomenal GOOD TIME, yet overall it didn't take me very long to fall into the world Matt Reeves has built.

Reeves - a stupendously talented director of high-end spectacle, as the APES reboot sequels showed - has nailed 'Gotham'. Christopher Nolan still regarded the city in his movies as a cosmopolitan one 'with fractures'. Here Reeves presents it as the dirty, broken cesspool that is consuming its inhabitants - and we are able to recognise it from the greatest comic books in the Batman run.

Okay, admittedly his homages get a LITTLE heavy and on the nose (there's a scene in which Batman kicks down the door of The Riddler's apartment that is framed, lit and even staged with the same red doored corridor in the background to match the moment Mills does the same to John Doe's in SE7EN... with both serial killers' having the same interior decorator) but you're not going to quibble when Reeves over-delivers on the spectacle.

(That car chase with The Penguin is a phenomenal experience - but, again, pedants could argue how wholly 'original' it is when elements of it are lifted from James Gray's WE OWN THE NIGHT.)

Reeves has also cast interestingly rather than big and, for the most part, it works (the Colin Farrell thing is... kinda... sorta... brilliant?)

I think if we've reached the point of accepting that the comic book movie now fully controls the cinematic market across all demographics than this is how you deliver your 'fight back':

You make your big, thematically dark serial killer / investigatory procedural movie with all your broad cap doffs to everyone from David Fincher and Christopher Nolan through to Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin... and you stick it inside of the mould of a BATMAN movie!

13. Av: The Hunt

I'm frustrated that one of the best action-thriller releases of 2022 is sitting right there on Netflix with zero promo and seemingly absolute silence in terms of internet chatter.

Emre Akay's AV (aka AV: THE HUNT) is a propulsive, timely, hard-edged Turkish spin on THE FUGITIVE esque 'man on the run' movies that sets its engines going 6 minutes in and doesn't stop for another 80 minutes thereafter.

The unique hook lies with its female protagonist (Billur Melis Koç's commendable and impressive turn as Ayşe) and the bare notion of her "crime" (infidelity) setting her up against what feels like one Turkish town's entire patriarchy.

Not everything Akay's attempting here works, the ending is abrupt to say the least and some may find a modicum of monotony sets in. But for the most part, it has simplicity in its structure on its side; Ayşe is set running and only stops to find herself in low-level situations that become high-wire tension drenched concerns every time a man walks into them.

12. Licorice Pizza

I was reminded watching this of an assertion David Mamet once made long ago about how a screenplay should 'throbbingly pulsate' with the *need* to be told. Because Paul Thomas Anderson's latest kinda/sorta proves Mamet wrong.

There's nothing here that screams out a story you 'need' to involve yourself in (a very good friend of mine would argue that would be true of all of Anderson's oeuvre, really) but that's not to say you wouldn't have a grand old time with it regardless.

Lazily (and incorrectly) attributed by some critics as being Anderson's paean to his own childhood in the Valley, it is in fact the filmmaker's ode to SOMEONE else's - hearing anecdotes of friend and producer (and co-owner of PlayTone with Tom Hanks) Gary Goetzman's childhood acting in YOURS, MINE AND OURS with Lucille Ball and starting businesses in his teens selling waterbeds and pinball, Anderson became fascinated by his life and was eventually tipped 'over the edge' into bringing it to the screen after finding out a teenage Goetzman once installed a waterbed in legendarily insane producer Jon Peters' home.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood composes a score that compliments Anderson's terrific curation of 1971 - 1974 musical 'deep cuts' that serve to soundtrack a loveably shaggy and messy movie (but a considerably less shaggy/messy one than Anderson's still mostly misunderstood INHERENT VICE).

There are things that work absolutely delightfully here and then there are things that don't (amongst them the entire John Michael Higgins bon mots with him using shockingly un-PC "Ahhh So" accents when speaking to his Japanese wives; Anderson saying its attitudes that would be "contemporaneous and accurate portrayals of the movie's time period" don't make them any less uncomfortable).

That same split exists in the performances. Sean Penn makes no attempt other than to play his usual 'notes' in embodying his William Holden facsimile whilst Bradley Cooper completely ~nails~ hairdresser-turned-producer / perpetual maniac Jon Peters. Alana Haim fluctuates scene-to-scene in terms of 'competency' as an actor (but mostly comes good in the end) whilst the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman's son Cooper lands straight-out-of-the-box as an actor of natural talent. And Skyler Gisondo drops in early to steal scenes left, right and centre as is his way these days (see also BOOKSMART).

Those 'outraged' by the age difference are right to highlight the hypocrisy that it would be very unlikely that a film of this ilk about a 25-year-old man falling in love with a 15-year-old girl would be met so rapturously. So it's a testament to Anderson's skill at play here that we spend the movie willing the two protagonists to end up together and thoroughly enjoying being in their company along the way.

11. All Quiet On The Western Front

I see some questioning why they did another adaptation of the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque when Lewis Milestone's 1930 version is still so definitive, effective and beloved.

Perhaps to some, it's 'quaint' by today's standards and the epic anti-war sentiments deserve to be reconfigured for an audience of today whose sensibilities are calibrated (desensitised, even?) by CALL OF DUTY, etc?

Edward Berger has done that; equaling Lewis Milestone's 1930 achievement in delivering a truly horrifying, sobering anti-war screed with a flow of violence so unabashed in its reality and extreme it'll shake the 'first person shooter' to attention and must •surely• deter anyone from ever refusing to believe warfare is only futile and unappealing.

Director Paul Schrader recently used his [wonderful] Facebook account to discuss this film thusly:

"There's a valid argument that all war films are pro-war films. It's not possible to dramatize the fetishisms, the comraderies, the energies, the strategies, the technologies, the common purposes of war without glorifying them. Every anti-war film is a pretend anti-war film. Netflix's German update of All's Quiet is as close to an anti-war film as anything I've seen. There's no bravery, no comradery, no honor, no intelligence - just stupidity and brutality. A searing indictment of war. But it's still a pro-war film."

I'm not sure I agree entirely with Schrader there but it rolls me back around to something the late Samuel Fuller once said about how it was the responsibility of the studios to never let the war movie die as a genre though for it not to be used as a means to entertain but to educate, that an audience member should come away with no desire to see a frontline or that filmmaker had failed.

When Ridley Scott learnt US armed forces applications went •up• after the release of BLACK HAWK DOWN he acknowledged he'd failed in his intent. Edward Berger hasn't failed here, have no doubt there. And he's given tremendous assistance from Volker Bertelmann's thumbing trumpet-blast score.

His decisions within his adaptation aren't flawless. The addition of a secondary plot (as represented by Daniel Brühl's Matthias Erzberger) following the creation of the November 11 armistice is well intended but it pulls away from the intensity of the singularly first-person narrative of the novel and the 1939 version. It lengthens the film unnecessarily and dilutes (only ever so slightly) the intensity of Paul Bäumer's journey.

As Bäumer Felix Kammerer is nothing short of exceptional. In the final stretch of the film he is utterly unrecognisable and your heartbreaks for the inevitably of his character's fate.

In the conversation of great war films to land in the last 10 - 20 years, this has to hold a place.

10. Everything Everywhere All At Once

I will admit that the first 20-odd minutes of this provoked more anxiety and stress in me than the whole of (the still sublime) UNCUT GEMS. At the exact moment it wondrously kicked into gear I was frankly already exhausted... and then it didn't stop for the full stretch of its 2½ hour run time.

To say it is unrelenting is an understatement. It is completely exhausting. In its unwieldy, epic state it is the most ill-disciplined and unrefined film to be born of a film so clearly built upon refined structure and narrative discipline. To put it simply, there is just TOO MUCH of a good thing going here.

And it IS good. Very good in fact.

But I could only just about cope with it. And I'm intrinsically built for a Michelle Yeoh showpiece that doesn't just lean in on her martial arts majesty and her worth as an actually brilliant actress, but also delivers thematically on the meaning of life, existentialism, metatextuality, what some are referring to as "dadaist absurdism", Asian-American identity in today's society, nihilism and the concept of the 'multiverse' done in a manner FAR greater than Marvel have done thus far.

Come "Awards Season", if the conversation doesn't include Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan (the man responsible for the brilliant 'Data' / 'Shortround' double-strike of the 80s) and Jamie Lee Curtis - all of whom are frankly tremendous - than legitimate questions have to be asked about a race / age bias or some sort of lack of comprehension as to what "best" actually means at these awards.

Yeoh is the anchor and obvious star of the show. It's a given that her martial art skills are fabulous but it's the additional shades she brings to this too; the dramatic depths, the genuine human emotion and the surprisingly exquisite comic timing.

The whole cast are equally great too though, including the legendary James Hong, Stephanie Hsu (saving the film from the shitter by thankfully replacing Awkwafuckwit) and, yes, the mighty Randy Newman "as the voice of Raccacoonie".

It's all astonishingly well directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as "Daniels") in a manner that will frequently drop your jaw... it's just they cause a drop so often and stay around for too long thereafter that you eventually begin to notice the jaw ache more than the film.

9. Hustle

I wonder whether Adam Sandler and director Jeremiah Zagar got some sort of early screening of TOP GUN: MAVERICK whilst it lay in 'pandemic situ' for 2½ years and realised there was still a way forward / no shame in unabashed feel-good cheese; staking a pole in the same warm, rewarding ground off the back of it.

Here's a film that stares at all the tropes that come with this sort of thing and lovingly embraces all of them - put-upon underdogs, stacked odds, boo-hissable villains and antagonists, training montages, rewarding endings - whilst finding a couple of new spins on a few of them.

It will probably reward more for those with an arcane knowledge of basketball and its current players (many of whom play themselves or roles herein) but it's rewarding in its own right too.

It's also a surprisingly funny film too. Sandler (who is very good here - he's sincere and natural, earning big laughs from being real and engaged) shows that his future must / should lie not in those soulless, joyless 'holidays with the buddies' broad anti-comedies he's become known for but in dry 'dramedies' that get to show how deft he can be as an actor whilst killing it with zingers dropped in his lap.

Sometimes you want cinema that's going to blow you away with something unexpected and unique. And sometimes you just need a new spin on dependable old standards to give you a good time.

8. Nightmare Alley

I absolutely ate this right up - loved it!

Yeah, it is drastically overstretched (does 150 minutes REALLY have to be the new 120-minute 'normal' now?) and there's a slight cruelty in putting someone like Bradley Cooper - who is considerably more a "movie star" than a strong actor, no matter what his ego tells him - up against wall-to-wall pitch-hitting exquisite acting talent as robust as [deep breath] Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, David Strathairn, Holt McCallany, Clifton Collins Jr. and Tim Blake Nelson...

... but those are the most minor of issues offset by the fact we get to spend time being spoilt by a master craftsman who's made one of the most sumptuously framed and shot films of the last few years.

This is a film where Guillermo del Toro's sheer passion (and the gorgeous cinematography by Dan Laustsen) seeps through every shot. There's an entire layer beneath the film's narrative and performances where you could watch this with the sound off and still fall into the images like it's a warm bath.

Those praising / criticising Del Toro for making a 'homage' to old film noir really miss the point that he's actually made less a homage and more an actual entry into the noir pantheon. It's not a tribute to the greats of yesteryear. It's an equal that happens to be set in that era.

7. Barbarian

I was really worried this wouldn't hold up as joyously once all the 'revelations' were out there and what not - though I can't imagine a first-time experience of it would hit as hard knowing all of its directions beforehand, so thanks for *that* Empire Magazine - but it does; slightly less impactful yet still absolutely a fun thrill-ride!

Easily one of my favourite horrors in quite some time and one of the best films of this year, you've GOT to go into this knowing as little as possible. Preferably nothing, in fact. The joy (one of the film's many) lies in being routinely wrongfooted at each and every point that a 'standard' horror would drop a 'typical' trope, whilst the dial keeps getting ratcheted up and up and up - until you're neck deep in expertly crafted scares.

There is absolutely a reason that it is an old-fashioned word-of-mouth sleeper hit and a "Fuck You" variation of it at that, grossing over $42 million worldwide (currently) off a $4.5 million budget after a disastrous door-to-door trip around every major and mini studio in town and getting rejected by all of them initially.

Honestly, there are some truly terrific horror beats in this thing; big dollops of shadowy manipulation, "Ooooh you fucker!" jump bits, gratuitous gore, stomach-turning gross stuff and exceptional levels of foreboding. That this is all delivered by Zach Cregger in a solo directorial debut (after a career in Twitch streaming and comedy troupe membership!) is nothing short of astounding. This thing plays like the work of a genre craftsman.

The film is a really interesting construction that offers up mini-movies within a... Actually, even THAT is saying too much. Let's just say that the accentuating of its quality level and its ability to throw you on the backfoot is achieved in the casting of Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long.

Campbell gives one of my favourite performances this year in this and I think the whole thing only works overall because of what her and Skarsgård pull off early on. And Long, who I'm a big fan of, is just... just... so deliciously wrong here that it's tremendous.

God, I can't wait to dig into this again and again. An instant genre classic, if you ask me!

6. Prey

I remain really impressed with this. Whilst a definite high watermark in the PREDATOR series (though is that THAT hard?), the notion that it may be an "instant action masterpiece" as stated by some critics is somewhat overblown. It certainly holds up to repeat viewing though as a terrific little actioner.

Dan Trachtenberg, working off a script by Patrick Aison and working with a performance by Amber Midthunder (an absolute find, by the way), delivers a clean, lean, rousing, thankfully streamlined action b-movie that in its final moments sets itself out as not so much a prequel but an opening chapter in a story trilogy that ends with the reveal in PREDATOR 2...

... and cuts out all the 'noise' drawn from the pretty naff PREDATORS, Shane Black's pretty disappointing THE PREDATOR and those pretty unwatchable ALIEN Vs PREDATOR 'side movies'.

There was a clear Joel Silver cultivated bombastic, borderline surreal, specifically McTiernan glossed perfection to the original PREDATOR that the franchise has frustratingly tried to emulate or flat-out rip-off. There's something very admirable here about how Trachtenberg manages to pay homage to it whilst trying to do its own thing.

5. Athena

Those opening 11 minutes are so audacious, so kinetic, so exhilarating and so sublimely choreographed and executed they serve to remind you how thoroughly tremendous cinema can be... on a streaming screen of your choosing through the Netflix app! Go figure.

What follows thereafter is a sheer rollercoaster ride whereby the film's smaller moments feel like a complete deflation because of the intensity of what's occurring on either side of them.

As a provocative political drama, it isn't entirely successful. It makes jabs in that regard rather than delivering effective blows. But the opening sequence is such a mighty, immersive 'statement of intent' that you're hooked and the film sneaks up on you as one of the best action thrillers of 2022.

And tucked away within this astounding, incendiary actioner is an acting debut from [then] 19-year-old Sami Slimane that isn't just thoroughly captivating but possibly one of the strongest debuts in the history of film.

Watch it as a double-bill with the very underrated and underseen Danish action flick ENFORCEMENT for extra accentuating!

4. Midnight

I put this up as the first truly great thriller of 2022. I was legitimately blown away by it - Kwon Oh-seung has crafted a high concept thriller (a deaf woman witnesses a serial killer's latest attack and must begin a silent flight and fight through one long night when she becomes his new target) that is so relentless and exhilarating there were long stretches where I forgot to breathe.

The film would be an absolute instant modern classic of its type just based on its jaw-droppingly impressive propulsion and the ingenuity of using deafness as a means to create additional danger out of everyday elements, but what it also has is two utterly exquisite performances:

Wi Ha-joon is deliciously odious as the serial killer but it's Jin Ki-joo as Kim Kyung-mi that will stagger you, most definitely in the film's final stretch where she delivers a monologue begging for her life that shatters your heart.

There's no country that is creating consistently magnificent cinematic content at the moment like the Koreans, who've absolutely mastered the ability to take the mainstream thriller and reconfigure it to fit a varying amount of co-genres (action, horror, sci-fi, etc) and themes. See the likes of THE YELLOW SEA, BEDEVILLED, THE SUSPECT, I SAW THE DEVIL, TIME TO HUNT, THE CHASER, THE MERCILESS, #ALIVE, THE GANGSTER THE COP THE DEVIL, AGE OF SHADOWS, THE VILLAINESS and now this.

3. Nitram

I was left genuinely shaken by this - a forensic recounting of the years of Martin Bryant's life (here identified as "Nitram" - 'Martin' spelt backwards - in order to continue the practice of 'dead-naming' him) leading up to the unfathomably evil 1996 massacre he committed at Port Arthur in Tasmania, in which he killed 35 people and wounded 23 others - several of whom were toddlers and children.

(This massacre - the worst in Australia's history - led to historic and fundamental changes in the country's gun laws in a manner that puts America to shame, though this film's postscript indicates the current statistics aren't impressive under scrutiny!)

It's easy to understand why this film was met with widespread concern and controversy within Tasmania itself. Only 2 cinemas in the whole island state chose to screen the film but opted out of advertising or listing showings. But those understandably perturbed and unsettled by its existence should draw something from the fact this is not a salacious nor gratuitous 'recreation'.

Justin Kurzel's previous jaunt around similar territory with his brilliant but thoroughly sadistic study of The Snowtown Murders easily leads you to believe the same level of unrestrained and unforgiving violence will be present here. That's not the case. The massacre itself is not shown other than to contextualise its beginning. There's an admirable restraint here that should be acknowledged.

Nor does the film seek to provide an 'out' or a rationalisation for Bryant's abhorrent behaviour. It presents his clear intellectual disabilities upfront and centre but never uses them as an excuse. Instead it leans in on how thoroughly damaged and dangerous he was long before 1996 and then clinically addresses how his social isolation and thirst for any form of inclusion on whatever term he could comprehend as 'normal' married with the neglect and lack of intervention from relevant authorities (parental, law, social services) created a harrowing / deadly storm - accentuated by decidedly odd circumstances and monies acquired.

The performances are across the board first rate; Essie Davis has the showy, quirky role that doesn't go where you think it will and Judy Davis is as dependably phenomenal as we've come to expect, but whilst this is very obviously Caleb Landry Jones' film and he is doing excellent and interesting work, it's Anthony LaPaglia who very softly and very delicately takes his role and uses it to break your heart.

This truly is one of the best films of 2022 - an uncompromisingly dark but important study that doesn't seem as interested in the "Why" as much as many suspected and instead quietly analyses the "How".

2. The Banshees of Inisherin

I fell instantly in love with this - hard! The marketing and Martin McDonagh's past work leads you into believing this is going to be a caustic comedic fable on fractured social graces and broken friendships, done 'the Irish way'. But that's just prologue.

Instead, McDonagh leads us into a tale of bizarro escalation and dysfunctional communication, of dented machismo, human warmth, unrequited love, repressed anger, extreme vengeance, loneliness and... maybe... metaphors for the Irish Civil War.

The script is dryly and frequently funny and the performances from the cast submerge themselves in the dialogue, knowing full well that they're being handed pure gold here.

Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon are dependably sublime as you'd expect but this is Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan's film. It takes a lot to say this, having spent decades either detesting the dude or apathetic to him, but Farrell's work here completely broke through to me once and for all. Farrell made me laugh and made me well up...

... but it's Keoghan's work here - specifically THAT scene with Condon down by the river's edge - that quietly devastated me to an extent that I didn't even realise I was crying until I'd drenched my own face. There can be no conceivable way the Best Supporting Actor Oscar isn't his.

I genuinely, genuinely adored this film and how it almost seems to take perverse pleasure in luring you in with the notion of some Irish GRUMPY OLD MEN redo with 'The IN BRUGES Boys' - only to slowly dim the tone and wrongfoot you into darkness!

1. Top Gun: Maverick

I had some degree of reticence that this wouldn't hold up 'at home'. Because, well, that IMAX experience really is a fuckin drug rush. But I need not have worried because everything that made TOP GUN: MAVERICK the inexplicably joyous filmic experience of 2022 is still all present and correct on repeat viewings. The most shocking element of all is that one of the greatest blockbusters / best films of the decade is a 36-year-old... sequel to TOP GUN??

That first TOP GUN movie is beloved for reasons totally disassociated from judging the film conventionally as a whole. It suffers enormously from being an empty confection with a main protagonist who is conceited, selfish, pretty misogynistic, unprofessional, predatory and by the film's end the character hasn't journeyed THAT far from those characteristics at all.

Here, you have a film with actual arcs - character-wise, dramatically and whatnot. So successful is it in this regard that I had a 'bit of a weep' at the end... over characters I couldn't have given two fucks about 130 minutes earlier. A lot of that has to do with the casting choices with an excellent Tom Cruise being backed up well by a shockingly good Miles Teller, a really lovely Jennifer Connelly, a brilliant Glen Powell, an underused Ed Harris, and a tender appropriate turn by Val Kilmer - and Jean Louisa Kelly (aka 'Uncle Buck's Niece') as his wife! The only weak link is the continually odious Jon Hamm, who takes the role Harris should've had.

How do you make this a truly flawless blockbuster? You cast either Tom Skerritt or Michael Ironside in Ed Harris' role. And Ed Harris in Jon Hamm's role. Coz MORE Ed Harris is NEVER a bad thing... and Ed Harris has never tortured a man and left him sterile by dragging him by his testicles with a claw hammer. Fuck YOU, Jon Hamm!

It is a film that finds ~something~ to say about time, legacy, regret, grief, ambition, responsibility, surrogate fathering and ageing and it says it inside of a sequel to a �� 36-year old• film of which the best thing you can say is that its soundtrack is great.

All of that though is just the "soft centre" at the core of what you're REALLY here for, which is some of the greatest cinematic craftsmanship in the history of blockbuster filmmaking. Seriously. Shitteth ye not one jot. In an age of ugly, cheap, less-than-competent greenscreen CGI in the likes of DR STRANGE 2 and UNCHARTED marvel at real actors being taken to the skies in actual planes and barreled/battered at legitimate high velocity for our entertainment in action sequences that are stunningly visualised and carried out with clean geography.

Director Joseph Kosinski has pulled off an astounding achievement here. Believe the hype - every word of it! This is a movie totally unashamed to not only lean in but actually fully embrace old-fashioned sensibilities in cinema; like wearing its heart on its sleeve, being unembarassed by 'high cheese', manipulative high octane musical scores and (best of all!) the BEST narrative trope in all of cinema:

Here is a film riddled with the highest tier of technical sophistication yet it's driven by a (story) engine of completely perfect simplicity - the 'men on a mission' structure; we watch our main man assemble a team, introduce a mission, train for it and complete it. There's nothing more to it than that and yet it really is quite brilliant.

So much so that it actually does the unthinkable and adds texture to Tony Scott's empty 1986 original.

I've legitimately been trying to think of a situation where there's been a belated follow-up to a film I didn't much care for that I ended up liking a great deal more than its predecessor. The best I could muster was the likes of RAMBO or SCREAM 4.

Then I started thinking about belated sequels that came, landed and blew me away on a vastly greater plane than where my affections sat on the preceding movie. I came up with CREED, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (of course) and THE COLOUR OF MONEY - the Tom Cruise connection being not at all lost on me in this scenario.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK is a genuinely terrific piece of cinema. It is without a doubt built to be a euphoric blast of cheesy feel-good blockbuster filmmaking. And in the process it will likely end up as the absolute feel-good movie of the year. It's almost unfortunate that it is dependent on its association to such a lesser film.

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And that’s that!

See you all next year... Find me on Letterboxd as Gonzo McNulty if you fancy more of this, but daily.

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